Four paintings by Etel Adnan, abstract images of
shapes that also appear to be landscapes whose defining elements are light and
shadow, were shown in Madhat Kakeis
abstrakta kabinett (Madhat Kakei’s Abstract Cabinet) at Moderna Museet in 2015-16.
The exhibition emphasised that the abstract image is not a modernist invention,
even though it took on new meanings through the work of the avant-garde in the
early twentieth century. “The idea of the impossibility of depicting the sublime
has considerably more ancient philosophical antecedents”, Daniel Birnbaum, the
director of the museum, wrote in presenting the show. This is familiar ground
to the artist, writer and professor of philosophy Etel Adnan, whose work was
also shown as part of the museum’s exhibition Efter Babel (After Babel) in 2015. Politics, aesthetics and war are
elements often present in her pieces, as is a critique of intolerance. ”The
problem is arrogance, that everyone is supposed to be the same” she says in the
catalogue to Efter Babel . “This need
for similarity is a kind of death, when what we need is multiplicity”.

Finding your bearings from places and the points of
the compass has been important in Etel Adnan’s life. She ascribes this to
growing up in a Lebanon under French rule as the only child of a Greek Orthodox
mother and a Muslim father from Damascus in Syria. She attended a French school
in Beirut but felt unable to identify with either the poor or the
French-speaking upper classes. Life in a minority of that kind involved a form
of exile. This has developed into a need on her part always to be aware of
exactly where she is.